Wednesday, February 12, 2014

I’d been thinking about the
boundaries of Creative Nonfiction – and realized that one of my favorite
writers of both fiction and nonfiction loves breaking
boundaries. Jonathan Lethem’s early novels
were noted for being bizarre/brilliant hybrids, leading up to the bestselling Motherless
Brooklyn, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award and was named
Book of the Year by Esquire; this was followed by The Fortress of
Solitude, a genre-juggling, oft-lauded bildungsroman. Other acclaimed collections and novels have continued apace (along with a MacArthur
Fellowship). His nonfiction work includes the essay collections The
Disappointment Artist and the iconoclastic The Ecstasy of Influence, which
plays with plagiarism (among other elements) – and was a finalist for the National
Book Critics Circle Award and a New York Times Notable Book.

I called him at his office at Pomona College, where he currently teaches, after the release of his most recent novel, Dissident Gardens, and we touched on a lot of topics, including:

The
Teaching of Writing:

Pretty busy right now?

Jumping
from books tours to teaching to the next thing – it’s kind of like a
triathalon.

Speaking of teaching –
I reread your essay, “The Disappointment Artist,” where you give some space to
the notion of Creative Writing programs possibly being like a pyramid scheme.
It’s funny, because when I first read
that essay, I had no interest in an MFA, and thought, “Yeah!” Now that I’ve
gone through the MFA process, re-reading the essay, I see it’s a really nuanced
piece.Is it weird for you, teaching
writing?

Oh,
I’m completely enmeshed now!

But you had this
reputation as an autodidact. Dropping out of school, working in a bookstore,
writing for years and years on your own—

People
cast me like that.Like this feral
creature that now works in a zoo. But it’s much more modulated….Sure, I dropped out of college, and didn’t
earn any degrees the hard way – I did the “honorary” thing.

But
back then, I went and re-created for myself a lot of the experiences that
typify writing school.I looked for
peers and mentors, I hammered together a regular “workshop” – an appointment
for myself, people I could show manuscripts to.We talked shop, shared gripes, encouragements.

A community.

Yeah,
I wasn’t off in some hut, off on an iceberg. It helped – I got off my high
horse about certain things I was trying, because they were making people roll
their eyes. I realized I needed to apply myself more diligently to
revisions.And I became mildly
socialized, in the way a writer needs to be socialized, when submitting
things and being rejected… And then eventually I replaced that with the lucky
professional stuff: Having an agent and an editor.But the point is, I wasn’t alone.I wasn’t some wolf boy. A lot of what I
constructed looks a lot like what I’m participating in now, but from the other
angle.

Being more on the
mentor side.

Helping
people not be too esoteric about themselves. Seeing that there are craft aspects to even the most
inspired or iconoclastic writing choices. And
also, the other thing I was doing those past years: I was reading an enormous
amount – everything I could think to
read, I read. And that’s what I
insist that everyone who is trying to be a writer has to do

.

That’s cool to hear,
because I’ve told my students that.

So
you teach, too.

I’m a part of the whole
thing now. Any advice?

Ha,
well, now that I participate in the
Ponzi scheme… I just try to give a lot of humble, individual attention to each
person who comes my way.Realizing
there’s not one big method – realizing writers and writer’s manuscripts are
pretty individual.And if I can help
them – which I can, at least some of
the time – that’s okay.It’s good.It’s a human
act.Even if it takes place within
this giant house of cards, right?

I totally agree.I think there’s this economic pressure to
perform right after graduation. Instead of saying, “How great that, for four
years of your life, you get to write, become a more whole human being?” There’s
an economic sense that if a student doesn’t become a professional writer right
after graduation—

Well,
that’s not a very likely situation. Setting out to do that is like setting out
to become a superhero.

Which some of your
characters have tried to do.

And
here I am, teaching… But really: writing is
a human thing. It’s a social participation that’s completely worth it.And necessary.For everyone, from the amateur to the Big Ol’
Pro who we like to put on a pedestal and routinely wrench off a pedestal, they’re
all doing the same thing… They’re trying to make space for their own thinking in the bigger conversation.

On
Writing from the Margins:

Speaking of making your
own space, and education – there’s a lot of spots in your work where a younger
person finds an older mentor, usually an outsider artist…

I
guess I identify very easily with people working from various vital
margins.I see those “marginal”
operations as, paradoxically, much more central than is often given
credit.A lot of the environment is made
up of a lot of people feeling like they’re marginal.

In your latest novel, Dissident Gardens, you dive into the
history of American Communists, which is a history that gets pretty short shrift elsewhere. Is that part of the margins?

Well,
similar to another one of my novels, The Fortress of Solitude, there’s a witnessing
aspect.I don’t claim to be a social
documentarian. All I’m trying to do is say: Lives were lived like this.These lives… are included.

They were here.

I
just want to say what I know.In a “can
I get a witness” fashion… I’ve picked material that means something to me in
way beyond any [political] statement I might make about it.

On
Fiction vis-à-vis Nonfiction (and Process):

I don’t want to ask the
“where do you get your ideas” question.But you write a lot of fiction and nonfiction, so let’s say you get a
notion – how do you pick if it should be, say, fiction or essay or whatever?

It’s
so different for different projects.It’s hard to make one overarching statement.

But you have to! It’ll
make for a better interview!

Well,
okay… Usually, I have a whole rumbling pile of different influences, things
that are bothering me, that are charged for me – fraught – in a way I don’t understand.And I’ll think, “Oh wait, here’s a cool idea…
someone would love this.”And who knows if
I’m right or not… but then that conjoins with something I’m trying to work
through emotionally or intellectually or both. Perhaps it’s some part of a
previous attempt that left me unsatisfied.Something I glanced off of and want to go at more directly.

To try to get it right?

Just
to open up a new area of exploration for myself.Exploring something I can’t think about
clearly… until I begin writing about it.

You’re learning by the
actual act of writing.

I
learn a lot by writing. I learn… what
I suspect.What I wish for.What I mean.What I feel.And also, I just learn
stuff.Because what I’m writing about will force me to go out and just read
a lot to figure out some subject.The
project drives me to an intellectual experience I’ve been wanting to have.

And so you just start
working.

It’s
all been sitting there, rumbling in a weird slag heap in my imagination.And I start organizing it by starting the
project.

So rather than thinking
about a specific genre, it sounds like it’s a more intuitive process.

I
guess there’s been very few things I’ve mistaken for being an essay that were
really a story.If they’re calling up
both those impulses at the same time, then I usually try something short and
end up with something weird. There’s a lot of pieces like that in Ecstasy of
Influence.Like “Proximity People.”

Or “My Internet”?

Yes.Where I’m using my image-making or
storytelling muscles to work out some thought.But I’m not going to the trouble of working it all the way up into
scenes and characters.The voice is the character.But mostly, my stuff organizes itself pretty
naturally into genres. There
are things that only fiction can do.And
then there are things that only work with that special game of first-person
confessional.

But there is overlap.
In a lot of your fiction, there’s first-persons confessing.

Yeah.
And the nonfiction draws on what I do as a fiction writer, too. But [for
nonfiction], there’s a fundamental stance that’s called up when I say: “This is
me.”The work will be electrified by that primary gesture: Me Telling You.

That’s such a great
distinct definition of memoir, “me telling you.”I don’t know why I’m asking so much about definitions
and delineations in an interview, when I’m not even sure if they really matter…

Well,
listen, I’m a great destroyer of category and genre – but that represents a
tremendous degree of engagement with category and genre, too.To be thinking about categories, fantasizing
about how they can be melted down and violated in interesting ways, is to be
pretty fascinated with them.

You have to like
taxonomy to bother messing with it?

Absolutely
– there are a lot of great writers out there that have no interest in messing
with it. Someone like, I don’t know, Dostoevsky? Who is standing totally at the
center of one giant operation, never questioning its edges, he’s just vomiting
out gigantic fictional vistas… And I’m here asking “What is a novel?” He’s forgotten
that question.

It’s the water he’s
swimming in.

Exactly.But someone like me, I’m doing a bunch of
things – short stories, essays, weird provocations, quasi-essays, novels – and
I’m touching the edges, the shore, all the time.Trying to futz with it.

And I guess your most
transgressive futzing, at least at the time, was the title piece in The Ecstasy
of Infuence?

Sure,
because I’m messing around with the boundaries between my voice and other
people’s voice – which is one of the boundaries we take most for granted.If you take from other people’s voices then…
you are plagiarizing.Right?So if you want to mess with that boundary:
“Oops! Get away from there! Don’t look there!”

And by messing with
that, you sort of became a spokesman for various Open Art groups, or for sampling culture. Just like, say, after Motherless Brooklyn you got involved
with various Tourette’s organizations.Is that stuff still happening?

I
get pulled into things, but I’m kind of a dodgy guy, you know?I don’t really like the identities I get
offered.The causes I’m offered to be
the poster boy for – I don’t get into to being the poster boy, not for very
long, at least.

“Evasive”
is a negative way to say that I’m just kind of restless. These things I write
about – they mean a lot to me. But eventually, I feel like I’ve expunged the
exploration – I don’t have any more to say. They’re things I was really interested –
still am, in a way.But it’s no longer a
live wire for me, electrifying for me to touch.

And that’s important –
you need that.

I’m
always looking for that next problematic situation that will give me that
sensation of having to figure something out.

On the
“Truth In Nonfiction” Debate:

I have to say, with all
the talk of boundaries, and fiction and nonfiction – there’s one question I’ve
never experienced in your work.The
whole “truth in nonfiction” debate – I’ve never found myself reading your work
and asking: Is this true?

I
guess that’s fair.Because I don’t ever
claim the memoirist's position.Maybe
I’ve self-inoculated?By writing
fiction, and doing the Ecstasy of Influence piece, and by writing so many
things that are self-questioning.I write
a lot about memory, I assert, “Maybe this happened?”So that issue doesn’t crop up for me… I’m not a Problem
Case.

Not
that I don’t write things that could be
questioned on those terms.

But that’s not really
the relationship that you have with the
reader. Every writer has a unique relationship with their readers, so it’s hard
to come up with hard and fast rules.

No.Let’s go further.It’s not hard
to come up with hard and fast rules.It’s impossible.There are no hard and fast rules.

Everything should be
judged case by case, maybe?I mean,
there’s the James Frey problem, sure, but then you have people questioning
someone like David Sedaris about little details when he never claimed to be
writing journalism.

Yes!
Right!Of course.You brought up the word “journalism.”Well, Sedaris never presented his stuff in
those terms, with the word “journalism.”All of this is journalists migrating their standards for internal
journalistic accusation over into a different kind of writing.Which is a total botch.It doesn’t make sense.It’s wrong.

But it does seem to pop
up a lot in memoir and essay.

Not
just there.Even in fiction, there was
the “scandal” that attached itself momentarily to Ian McEwan about his research
and sourcing.Moronic.I mean, absolutely moronic.But that was journalists projecting their…
what?Ethics?It’s like kabuki etiquette.

That’s a great way to put it. It sort of explains
why these “scandals” sometimes seem so absurd to me. For example, another
author whose fiction and nonfiction I
like: John Steinbeck.I saw somewhere
that someone was going back to Travels with Charlie to find out if he really went to all the places in that
book.

Oh,
good lord! Whatever.Where do we stop
then – what’s next?It’s like not liking
a film because you find out some of the lines were dubbed.“What?They did that in post-production?A travesty!”

That’s hilarious.And I didn’t mean to get us distracted into
this debate.Mostly, I just want to go
back to what you were talking about, when talking about working on new projects.About just going after whatever is gnawing at
you.That feels like good advice.

Not
just what gnaws at you.Go after what delights you.

***

(the above collage was created by Dave Mondy from an author photo and covers of Lethem's books)

Dave Mondy has won several awards for his travel writing, and has also written for public radio (A Prairie Home Companion) and toured several one-man shows throughout the country. He recently graduated with his MFA in Creative Nonfiction, and is publishing new work in literary magazines while also writing a column on sustainably-sourced liquor and beer (for which he enjoys doing research).

3 comments:

What an intelligent and spacious view of writing. It's often a puzzle to me that a culture which values fusion or hybrids in other areas -- music, visual art, food, photography -- has such hard and fast insistence on fiction being one thing, non-fiction another, and the fierce borders between them.

Theresa: Yes! And apologies for the slow reply... But my sense, post-interview, was just an enthusiastic YES! This isn't to say that there isn't an occasionally perfidious blending of genres... but I feel like the badder apples might be weeded out naturally by readers responding unfavorably, and maybe we don't need some excessive, academic reaction. As if we should let writers write, without internal arbiters ("Writers Without Arbiters" as a charity?), and the good ones... well, we'll just really enjoy them.

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